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If you come on this page from google, don’t go further. You are looking for the command “show storagearray longrunningoperations;” 🙂

Yesterday one of our client had an issue during the upgrade from SNFS4 to SNFS5. While troubleshooting the issue we had to fail and replace one of the metadata drive from the NetApp E-Series disk array.

M440 metadata storage and controllers

Usually we just replace the failed drive with the new drive and check everything is good in the Quantum StorNext web interface and don’t bother too much about it.

This time it’s a bit different since the first issue brought a lot of visibility to the SAN architecture. We wanted to keep everything stable and avoid to impact the production system with useless latency, lower performances or downtime visible by the users.

So when we decided to replace the metadata drive we wanted to see the progress of the drive replacement to make sure everything goes smoothly and to be able to communicate when the SAN will be completely healthy and in an optimal state.

Unfortunately the only management options we have are:

Quantum StorNext web interface

NetApp E-Series CLI command (SMcli)

These 2 tools don’t provide an intuitive way to check how far we are in the rebuild of the drive. StorNext webui doesn’t expose this detail of information and it took us more than 1 hour, 4 calls to support and few google queries to figure out how to get this information from the CLI (SMcli).

SNFS web interface notification for a drive replacement

So if you want to know how your rebuild is progressing, you need to type the command “show storagearray longrunningoperations;”:

But I am happy we discovered the command “show storagearray longrunningoperations;” to monitor the copy back from the hot spare to the new drive and to confirm everything completed correctly with everything in healthy and optimal status.

About disk storage array CLI. I got spoiled early on with DDN S2A (2004) command line, later the SFA CLI (2008) disappointed me. Nexsan didn’t provide any CLI at all (2012). But today I realized NetApp / LSI / Engenio (2014) is definitely not better. Still a lot of progress in the world of block storage appliances to achieve (If it still makes sense for the hardware vendors to work on it).